Americans' support for impeaching Trump rises: Reuters/Ipsos poll

Authored by reuters.com and submitted by polit1cs
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of Americans who said President Donald Trump should be impeached rose 5 percentage points to 45 percent since mid-April, while more than half said multiple congressional probes of Trump interfered with important government business, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday.

FILE PHOTO - U.S. President Donald Trump waits to welcome Slovakia's Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini at the White House in Washington, U.S., May 3, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

The opinion poll, conducted on Monday, did not make clear whether investigation-fatigued Americans wanted House of Representatives Democrats to pull back on their probes or press forward aggressively and just get impeachment over with.

The question is an urgent one for senior Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives, who are wrestling with whether to launch impeachment proceedings, despite likely insurmountable opposition to it in the Republican-controlled Senate.

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi re-emphasized that the leaders of the investigative committees in the Democratic-controlled House were taking a step-by-step approach.

“This is very methodical, it’s very Constitution-based,” Pelosi said. “We won’t go any faster than the facts take us, or any slower than the facts take us.”

In addition to the 45 percent pro-impeachment figure, the Monday poll found that 42 percent of Americans said Trump should not be impeached. The rest said they had no opinion.

In comparison, an April 18-19 survey found that 40 percent of all Americans wanted to impeach Trump.

The latest poll showed stronger support for impeachment among Democrats and independents.

It also showed that 57 percent of adults agreed that continued investigations into Trump would interfere with important government business. That included about half of all Democrats and three-quarters of all Republicans.

After a nearly two-year investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, House Democrats are pursuing multiple inquiries into Trump’s presidency, his family and his business interests.

Trump is stonewalling at least a half-dozen such inquiries, refusing to disclose his tax returns, invoking executive privilege to keep the unredacted Mueller report under wraps and filing unprecedented lawsuits to block House investigators.

“It’s becoming a circus over there” in Washington, said Fatima Alsrogy, 36, a T-shirt designer from Dallas who took the poll. “There are so many more important things the country needs to pay attention to right now.”

Alsrogy, an independent, thinks Trump should be impeached. Yet she also wishes lawmakers would do more to improve the healthcare system for self-employed people like her.

“I bought my own (health) insurance on an Obamacare exchange,” she said. “It’s a huge expense, and I don’t know if Obamacare is going to be amended or taken away. It’s stressful.”

The poll also found that 32 percent agreed that Congress treated the Mueller report fairly, while 47 percent disagreed.

Trump’s popularity was unchanged from a similar poll that ran last week - 39 percent of adults said they approved of Trump, while 55 percent said they disapproved.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,006 adults and had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points.

SafeSpaceGhost on May 9th, 2019 at 20:41 UTC »

America is finally realizing 10 felony counts of Obstruction of Justice might warrant Impeachment on their own?

RCVPaperBallots on May 9th, 2019 at 20:25 UTC »

I give exactly zero shits about what McConnell will do, or what GOP senators think. We don't need their permission to do the right thing.

All we need is to ensure that if impeachment arrived in the Senate, the traitors who vote against it suffer more disapproval than approval for their cowardly decision.

As long as protecting Trump is a loser for Republicans, impeachment is a win.

I'm confident that it will be. But more than that, I'm also confident that if I'm wrong on that, the battle's pretty much over. Fascism won.

The idea that this moment isn't here yet, but might arrive at some indeterminate point in the future when some conveniently ready-made grass-roots majority suddenly wakes up and start calling for his impeachment, is absolutely ridiculous. It has to happen now, because now is when the constitutional crisis is hitting. Now is when the evidence is front and center. Now is when he's been exposed as a lifelong fraud. There will never be a better time. Our leaders need to stop polling, get out there, and lay out the case. Go on the road, if you have to. Talk to your districts! Have a town hall! Trump's campaigning every day, so where you at? Where's the 50-state Protect Our Democracy rally tour?

Lead a protest! Can you imagine that, a Democratic congressperson leading a protest instead of sitting in an office sneering condescendingly out their window at the desperate 'bunch of disorganized hippies' with cardboard signs, who are trying their best to get something going in between work and cooking dinner for their kids? These days, we have such low expectations that we gush if a politician smiles for the camera at a picket line, says a couple of words, and leaves 10 minutes later.

I thought you were our leaders! I'm so tired of seeing this excuse that Democrats just get to float like driftwood in the tides of public opinion polls, while the ordinary citizens bear the responsibility of "making them" do their job through direct action. Last time we tried that, it was called Occupy Wall Street, and the movement was ridiculed endlessly by the media, the general population, and Democratic leaders alike. And why? Essentially because it had be led by regular people, who didn't have a bunch of professional staffers running the thing, who didn't have Brooks Brothers Riot money, who didn't have consultants and PR firms and trained spokespeople. But the ingrate naysayers will be lucky if a protest in 2019 is half as coherent or persistent as OWS, because that's about as good as we're going to get when you're relying on ordinary, exhausted people, who have real jobs and endless obligations, to do the work of our leaders for them.

Imagine instead if every Democrat in the House was as strong and vocal as Warren is being in the Senate, where her efforts are supposedly futile! Funny how that doesn't bother her. Shit man, I should be logging in and seeing a dozen viral Michael-Bennet-style youtube-rants daily. Don't you work for me? Produce, bitches! I want them on my desk tomorrow morning. What else are you doing? Not passing laws, that's for sure! You're professional persuaders, right?

Persuade!

I'm sorry, but if you're one of these people who believes the majority of Americans would support the GOP more if they voted to deliver the final blow to our democracy, if you believe that you can't take on the GOP senate because you'd lose public support, if you believe that most people are consenting to what's going on - then I have bad news for you:

By definition, you no longer believe in American democracy.

p011t1c5 on May 9th, 2019 at 20:25 UTC »

[The poll] also showed that 57 percent of adults agreed that continued investigations into Trump would interfere with important government business.

When was the last time the Senate even had a floor debate on anything which the House had passed? The Senate seems content to do little more than confirm Trump's judicial branch appointments. The House might as well use its time more productively than trying to pass legislation which would go nowhere in the Senate.